Run a Display Unattended in the Lobby

Run a Display Unattended in the Lobby

A screen in a hotel lobby has to do one thing for months at a time: show flights, without a guest opening a browser menu and without anyone from the front desk walking over to fix it. This article explains what LobbyFlight itself does for that, which address the screen has to load, and how you check afterwards that the screen really is running.

Two things matter more than anything you can install on the device. The first is the display mode, because it decides whether the board reacts to touch at all. The second is the URL, because it decides which configuration the screen loads and whether the screen reports back to the portal. Get those right and most of what people traditionally install kiosk software for is already handled.

Start with TV mode

Every display in LobbyFlight has a device setting. Open Displays, open the screen you want to change, and on the General tab set Device to TV.

TV mode is the mode built for an unattended screen. Touch events are switched off, so a guest tapping the panel changes nothing. Search is switched off, so there is no input field to get stuck in. Auto-scroll and rotation run continuously and never pause: in Touch and Website mode the board pauses its movement for thirty seconds after someone interacts with it, and in TV mode that pause is zero, because there is no interaction to wait out.

This is worth doing before you consider locking the device down at the Android level. A screen in TV mode that a guest taps simply keeps showing flights. Device-level locking protects against someone deliberately trying to leave the browser, which is a smaller and rarer problem than the accidental tap.

Get the display URL from the portal

The address a display loads looks like this:

https://your-domain.example/display/<hotelId>?display=<displayId>

Both hotelId and displayId are UUIDs — long generated identifiers, not readable short names like your hotel's initials. That is why you never type this address by hand. You copy it from the portal.

There are two places to get it. During initial setup, /portal/setup shows the finished address in step 6, Preview, with a copy button. Afterwards, open Displays, open the screen, and go to the Preview & URL tab, which shows the address, a copy button and a QR code you can scan with the display device to avoid typing anything at all. The Preview & URL tab is only available while the display is switched on, so if the tab is greyed out, activate the display first.

If a screen has a verified custom domain configured, the portal hands out that domain instead, and that address is the one to use.

Why `?display=` is not optional

The ?display= parameter is the part people leave off, and leaving it off breaks two things quietly rather than loudly.

Without it, the screen loads the hotel's default configuration rather than the configuration you set for this particular screen. If you run several boards, they will all show the same thing, no matter how carefully you configured them individually.

Without it, the screen also sends no heartbeat. Heartbeats are what the portal uses to know a screen is alive, so a display opened without the parameter stays listed as Never opened forever, even while it is running perfectly on the wall in front of you.

There is one more address you may come across: the same URL with &preview=1 appended. That is the preview the portal uses for its own thumbnails and for the "open on this device" action. It deliberately does not send heartbeats, so that checking a screen from your laptop does not make a dark panel in the lobby report itself as online. Do not put the preview URL on the actual screen.

What the screen does on its own

Once the right URL is loaded, a fair amount happens without anyone touching the device again.

Configuration changes reach the screen by themselves. The display re-fetches its configuration every twenty seconds. Change the airport, the colours or the rotation settings in the portal, and the screen picks the change up shortly afterwards. You do not need physical access to a locked device to reconfigure what it shows.

Flight data refreshes on a schedule set by your plan. Basic refreshes hourly, Pro every thirty minutes, Premium every five minutes. If you are watching a new screen and wondering why the times are not moving, this is usually the answer, and it has nothing to do with the device or the browser.

Movement on the board comes from the rotation settings, not from a screensaver. On the Behavior tab you control whether the board rotates between departures and arrivals, whether your own slides are included in that rotation, how long each rotation step lasts, how long the flight list is shown, and how often the display switches language. By default the board rotates every thirty seconds, shows flights for two minutes at a time, and switches language every sixty seconds. If you want a still screen, turn rotation off there rather than fighting the device.

A network drop is handled visibly. When the device loses its connection, the board shows an Offline Mode badge in the corner and keeps showing the flights it already has. When the connection returns, the badge disappears on its own.

Confirm the screen is actually running

LobbyFlight monitors displays for you, and this is the check that matters after installation.

A running display sends a heartbeat every five minutes. The portal waits twelve minutes without one before calling a screen offline — two missed beats plus a little slack, so that a single dropped request during a reload or a brief network blip does not report a healthy screen as down. That is also why you should not panic three minutes after switching a screen on.

You can see the result on the Displays page and on the dashboard, where each screen carries one of four states. Showing means heartbeats are arriving. Offline means none has arrived for more than twelve minutes and something is wrong. Switched off means you disabled the display yourself, which is not a fault. Never opened means the display was created in the portal but its URL has never been loaded — which, if the panel is visibly running, points straight back at a missing ?display= parameter.

After setting up a screen, wait a few minutes, then look at the Displays page. If the screen says Showing, the URL is right, the heartbeat is arriving, and the installation is done.

Locking down the device itself

If your screen is somewhere guests can reach it and you want the device locked to the browser, that part happens in Android and in whatever kiosk software or device management you choose, not in LobbyFlight. We cannot document those settings reliably, because the menus differ between manufacturers and Android versions and the third-party options change on their own schedule.

What is worth knowing is which problem each approach solves. Android's built-in screen pinning restricts the device to a single app and is free and immediately available; the menu path to enable it differs by device, so check your manufacturer's documentation. A dedicated kiosk browser adds automatic start after a reboot and recovery after a crash. Central device management is what you want if you are deploying many screens across several properties and need to configure them without visiting each one.

Whichever you pick, the LobbyFlight side does not change: the device loads the display URL you copied from the portal, and everything about what the board shows stays configurable from the portal afterwards.

When something looks wrong

All your screens show the same thing. The ?display= parameter is missing from the URL on at least one device, so it is loading the hotel default instead of its own configuration. Recopy the address from Preview & URL.

A screen is running but the portal says "Never opened". Either the URL is missing ?display=, or the device is loading the preview URL, which does not send heartbeats. Both are fixed by copying the plain URL from the portal again.

The flight times are not changing. Compare the refresh interval of your plan against how long you have been watching. This is a plan setting, not a device or cache problem.

Nothing on the board moves. Check the rotation and auto-scroll settings on the Behavior tab before looking at the device.

Next steps